


On the Departure of a Beloved...

by Glass_Jacket



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Genre: Elio's POV, M/M, angsty, open letter to Oliver, probably self indulgent on the author's part
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 19:16:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14063676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glass_Jacket/pseuds/Glass_Jacket
Summary: I wait for you at midnight, wondering if I’ll catch some breath of air with your scent, your smile, your voice calling your name, gently urging me until I can’t think of anything but where I end and you begin.  I tell myself you are long gone, and even while you thrive and live and eat on the other side of the ocean, you haunt this place and this place in my heart.  I wish there was a better word for it.I wish I could tell you everything and nothing.





	On the Departure of a Beloved...

**Author's Note:**

> So this happened and I feel like I won't be stopping any time soon and I didn't want to get involved in another fandom but what can you do

~~Oliver~~ \- 

~~Elio~~

...

I want to be able to blame the naivety of youth. To blame the precarious nature of the heart, naturally cautious. To blame the precocious nature of the body, naturally curious. At one time I was angry with myself, with my actions and reactions - did I wait too long? Come too soon? Open myself up to being burned out by the embers of your fingertips, and then lovingly reconstructed with every breath that fanned over my skin? Did I invite it? And if so, did I do so with that aloofness my parents teased me about? I’d like to think I did, but you knew what I was doing perhaps before I even did.

_“I didn’t know what to think,”_ you laughed in the moonlight two days later.

_“I don’t believe that,”_ I countered, reassured by the memory of our precise and frantic coupling only an hour before.

_“It’s true,”_ you insisted, shaking your head.

Your hair is paler in the moonlight.

_“Yours is almost blue,”_ you replied almost dreamily.

_“Did I say that out loud?”_ I watched your face for a sign, and it came in your sigh, almost sad, as your hand cupped my cheek, long fingers curling up to snare my aforementioned hair.

_“Oliver,”_ you breathed, moving closer.

_“Ell-ee-oh,”_ was my only response.

+

I find myself breaking down the bigger conversations we’ve had into smaller increments, and then contemplating each movement like I would untangle Bach and study it, reform it, until it was to my liking. My style. If I moved this word or changed the inflection, then the story would sound very different.

Maybe I wouldn’t sound like such a prick.

Maybe your gaze on those first few days wouldn’t seem so indifferent, so cool, so unreachable.

For all the time I put into translating your work, and into transcribing mine, I’ll admit I’m a horrible study of the first person, and I can’t decide if I’m the antagonist of my own story or not.

And don’t think of yourself as the protagonist, you and I both know your actions were merely an equal and opposite reaction to the forces of our orbit around one another.

( _Fuck, I’m using space metaphors. I need to ~~get out of this house~~ never leave because this house is everything that you and I were and out there is everything we can’t ever be_ )

Were we destined to collide?

No, I don’t think so. I could have easily chosen one of the other candidates, urged my father to settle on another person to fill my room for the summer. I remember seeing your face, and yet I don’t; the only thing I do remember with any clarity was lifting my shoulder in indifference, and then telling him that whoever he chose would work out, before dashing out the door to meet Mariza.

It’s funny how suddenly you can look at a parent, someone who raised you and taught you to be human, and see that they are just that: a human, drawing on their own human experience, telling you human things that you never thought they could feel or think or rationalize.

Thank you, then, Papa, for doing your part in the grand scheme of things.

+

_I remember everything._

Suddenly I find myself five years older than that summer and sprawled across the bed - mine, yours, ours - the window open, Anchise’s peach trees having a sumptuous affair with the summer breeze, the gentle clink of dinner dishes being set out under the trees, my mother’s laughter, my father’s gentle chiding of another student.

They’re getting younger, these students, or they seem to be. Perhaps it’s a combination of my own growth, and how far removed I have become. Still, I feel the selfish rawness of my seventeen-year-old self, sullenly pressing my face into a pillow that came to replace the one that held your head and your dreams for a time. I try to sniff you out in every corner - every year it is the same thing. I look for your trunks - red ones, yellow ones, green ones, or maybe even blue ones to match Billowy, and the colour of your eyes. I wait for you at midnight, wondering if I’ll catch some breath of air with your scent, your smile, your voice calling your name, gently urging me until I can’t think of anything but where I end and you begin. I tell myself you are long gone, and even while you thrive and live and eat on the other side of the ocean, you haunt this place and this place in my heart. I wish there was a better word for it.

I wish I could tell you everything and nothing.

+

I can no longer eat Mafalda’s latkes and not taste the tears that clawed my throat when you called that first winter. The holiday passed in a blur, melted between my fingers like the chocolate coins, like the candles left to burn in the menorah. The sound of Papa’s voice calling ‘mazeltov’ on the other phone was strange - there was a strangled tenderness there like he wished nothing of the sort for you, and for me to never have had my heart broken. I recognize that now.

Winters have come and gone, and the sound of snow shuffling under leather-soled wingtips is not unlike the slide-and-slap of your espadrilles on the rough shores of our place. New York is a strange thing that oozes its existence in the summer and cracks through the fog of winter as a brilliant beacon, neon lights, and vaporous breath. I wonder what my name looks like written in the frost that comes when you breathe on a cold window. My fingertip squeaks down, and I don’t write _Oliver_ , of course, but am chided by a few classmates for etching _E-l-i-o_. I don’t know how you scrawl your letter ‘l’; it wasn’t in the cycle of letters you wrote on the bottom of my note:

_Grow up. Meet me at midnight_.

If I’m awake when the clock rolls over then I roll over, too, and find you on the edge of a dream, lounging on your side next to me in my little bed in Italy. Maybe your skin glows with the sweat that came with our coupling. Maybe we haven’t started yet and you’re waiting for me to make the first move.

Maybe we could just-

_“Just what?”_ you whispered in the blue shadows of the room. We are somewhere in the middle, spent, but not entirely. 

_“Maybe,”_ I began again with a self-conscious giggle, _“we could try…”_ I trailed off while my cheeks burned.

_“Oh, I’m all for trying,”_ you replied eagerly, reaching across the bed to pull me beneath you. _“Oliver,”_ you called softly. _“Oliver. Tell me, Oliver, tell me and I’ll do it. Again and again, until it’s right, or very, very wrong.”_

_“Please tell me you don’t think that.”_

_“That this is wrong?”_

I nodded, my stomach gone hollow.

You shook your head instantly. _“Never. Others might-”_

_“I don’t care about the others,”_ I insisted, pushing my mouth to yours for a handful of sweet seconds.

_“No,”_ you agreed. _“Neither do I.”_

+

We are way past the hour of appointment now. I’ve come to love brandy, and this piano bar where I hunch over the keyboard, drawing my fingers down over the keys like you did the bumps of my spine. The air is hazy with the cigarette smoke of the night; there are few people here now, which is how I like it. The stragglers come to hear a classically trained pianist, but they don’t know it. They think I’m just like them, and perhaps they’re right, and I’m just drifting in and out, pretending to have important things to attend to.

The only thing important in life, I think, is understanding what has been given to us. For however long we have it, we must honour it, cherish it, and not question the validity of it, but rather bask in it, soak it into our bones, into our sleep and our wakefulness, our very lives. When I play that piece by Bach, the one that I used to flirt my way into your good graces, I start at the very beginning and lose myself in it for a while. Here you cannot touch me. Not yet. Not for another eight minutes. Here I am by myself but I know you are coming in a rush of memories, barefoot on the marble floor as you do as you’ve been told. The backs of my legs stick to the bench as I hammer and tease, and you become exasperated with my churlish behavior. I half expected you to cuff me on the ear; in hindsight I know I certainly would have, had I been Oliver, and you were Elio.

But then I paused - and here I pause before I play it the way I played it before, on the guitar while perched in a peach tree, and I am envious of your memory of me. I crave to see me the way you did, the way you do, and stupidly I look up from where I’ve let myself go. You’re not in the piano bar. You’re not even close. If the windows were open and you had passed by, in New York for some inane reason, would this make you stop in your tracks?

Later I am at home, and I dig my guitar out and strip down to nothing but my boxer shorts. On the edge of my futon I try to find you and me, and my fingers are numb by the time I’m done torturing myself. I’ve bled on the fretboard, and worn grooves in my heart like I did in your back. Suddenly disgusted with my foray into nostalgia, I push you away. I’ve pushed so much away, even myself, despite the wisdom my father bestowed upon me. 

I needed it then, clutched it to my chest along with Billowy and wept into both, words and fabric and time. When I feel myself forgetting, I’ve only to pull the shirt, a thread, a note on the piano, and I am submerged. I am plunging into the water after making love all night, and I grieve for all the things that were.

I mourn Crema, and apricots, sunrise bike rides, and the smell of the asphalt as it baked in the Mediterranean sun. I mourn for your poolside heaven.

I mourn us.

I mourn _Elio_.

Come morning this will all be a dream, and I’ll fold your shirt away with my heart, and entertain the thought: Who cracks open your boiled eggs in the morning? ( _I did so once, so easily, it came to me naturally, and you let me take over, and you let me take over…_ )

I remember everything, too, and then, when I’ve shut the drawer on borrowed shirts and time, I’ll allow only one final thought: Is it just as breathtaking and blinding to be the one who departs? Or is it better to be the one left behind?


End file.
